Indians abhor differences
A country has various physiognomies stacked in its bosom. It’s a face with a thousand features, and a body stacked with a million souls. It’s a river that streamed a hundred miles and burst with innumerable fish, but remained static enough to be lulled when you touched it. It’s a path that moved with the air and sound of plunking footsteps but widened itself patiently outside your curious, glaring bedroom window.
The most acute difficulty stems from that extremely vacuous question; the one that expects me to describe an Indian, not the country that’s the subject of our insipid, incomplete perspectives. For The Typical Indian is everywhere. Spread along miles and miles afar. From the smirking Industrialist in his gleaming, mocking suit to the lungi-clad sweating man in partly bare legs clutching used glasses of tea behind his tea-stall. From the self-conscious college goer with unsure, complacent eyes to the beggar women with cupped hands and unshed tears. We’re all ‘typical Indians.’
Perhaps our inability to pinpoint what exactly our countrymen mean to us is a result of our unstable, turbulent past. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that we were never one race of people, but outsiders who came and created fences between each other. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that we came and loved, but never loved enough, and never expressed that love in wholly proportionate ways.
Our incomplete brokenness could be one of the reasons why neither our political richness nor our social diversity nor our ideas of religious salvation have been able to redeem us. The diversity that we often display with thundering pride on our thumping brown chests and shirt sleeves with clear, gleaming smiles has often been the very cause of our damnation; dire, unmistaken, implied. We pride ourselves on the beauty of our intricately built temples, but ignore the story about the broken mosque. We hold banners proclaiming the miraculous story of our wealth but overlook the nauseating ache that glimmers in our slums. We love our diversity that makes us stand out in the world hierarchy, but forget to wonder if it is, after all, our diversity that holds us back and makes us less tolerant of each other’s differences.
For we Indians abhor differences. We are wary of the colours that ruin our patterns. We pick up our hammers at the sight of change. We clutch our prejudices so near our skin that they may touch our bones. And every day while we go about our jobs, we hoard the knowledge of those differences at the back of our brains and smack their bums.
The knowledge that ours may not be the only story and horrifyingly, the only perspective. That our faith could only be the minuscule glitter of a spark that makes our country shine. That black people could be considered beautiful. That women can step out and lead. That children can decide their own paths in life. That engineers can be jobless and the poor can take quick strides. That men could, for a change, fall in love with other men and women with other women. That what we call ‘modernity’ and love to glare at skeptically could only be the result of a natural progression that arises from what we loathe about ourselves; our differences. For a nation created out of geographical bits of land that coagulated into one, and was founded on the mélange and variation that so disturbs us, our attitudes towards change seems far from normal and is, in fact, stupendously ironic.
Because after all, India was never created. India was not born or conceived within a period of time, after the partition with Pakistan or the arrival of the white man. India was always there. India was there before the Aryans set foot and brought the advent of Brahmanization. India was there before the caste and the purdah. India was there before the Gujarat riots and the Sangh Parivar. No man ever stood up one day and proclaimed that he would create India. Because even before men decided what to do with the borders of their countries, India was there. All other cultures and all other races were mere add-ons, that were sometimes welcomed with wide arms and open, unassuming scans. And the source of most of our inexpressible misery ascends from the gnawing efforts of some people to pigeonhole our definitions and restrict our perceptions.
For all those who wish to describe India, I would like to lovingly, devotedly demolish the myth for you. Not only because a nation generally has many facets, but because this is a country that probably had no beginning. It just happened; formed with the help of slow, patient intakes of our breaths and the gradual human deposition of our dust. And like what makes everything ancient in our history so exquisitely beautiful; India has had the ability to absorb within its soul everything that sporadically happened to us – wars, genocides, conquests, peace, the partition, the myths and legends, the whips and shields, the devastation and clamour – and rise as the indomitable, wrecking phoenix of its own ashes.
Prerna Kalbag is an independent journalist based in Chennai, India. Words, art, feminism and people are some of the things she is passionate about. An odd soul, she often lives in her own world of oddities and quirks, but has a sensitive approach to things outside it.